A building at Paris International Airport, Corona architecture. Image by author. Humans have always contemplated the importance of the invisible in nature. To account for the invisible influences of the Earth and its cosmos, humans have invented ‘forces’ to explain their impacts. Spirit forces, even God(s) might be human inventions to help us understand the
Tag: solastalgia
I have meteoranxiety. The red, orange and yellow colours on the satellite weather screen indicate the intensity of precipitation. Yellow is moderate, red is heavy rain. I am being teased by the rain. Only the top of my head is wet but the most savage drought I have experienced in my lifetime (I am 66)
The loss of identity tied to a sense of place was one of the defining characteristics of my concept of solastalgia.[1] The issue of “identity” was even in the sub-title of the first publication devoted to it. In my first publication on this topic I argued that, while solastalgia is a serious psychic condition, it
The PDF: Open Cuts Solastalgia 2003 Written by my colleagues Nick Higginbotham and Sonia Freeman for the Joint Medical and Health Sciences Newsletter 118 December 2003. I provided the notes on Solastalgia for the article which was edited by Kathy Byrne of the Faculty of Health, The University of Newcastle.
I have created the meme of the Symbiocene as a counter to the age of solastalgia within the Anthropocene. The Symbiocene offers the prospect of deep mitigation of the causes of global warming and species extinction. The foundations of this idea can be found in my essay Exiting the Anthropocene and Entering the Symbiocene
Solastalgia is the lived experience of negative environmental change. As a psychoterratic (psyche-earth) experience and emotion, solastalgia is now well established in the global literature on place and its transformation. Solastalgia has its origins in the Upper Hunter Region of New South Wales. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, while an academic at The
The sudden illness, then death of Polly Higgins (1968 – 2019) is a sad and monumental loss to all humanity. As a champion of the concept of ‘ecocide’, she was taking on the whole world. I believe she would have won. The affinity between her work and mine was captured in Earth Emotions in this
Solastalgia I define solastalgia as the pain or distress caused by the ongoing loss of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory. It is the existential and ‘lived experience’ of negative environmental change, manifest as an attack on one’s sense of place. It is characteristically a
Climate science has been warning us about chronic, negative environmental changes for decades now. However, the scientists have been wrong on almost every front. Wrong in the sense that every prediction they have made has been shown to be mistaken. Climate reality, as it has unfolded, has been worse than their predictions. The science has
A positive feeling of oneness with the earth and its life forces where the boundaries between self and the rest of nature are obliterated and a deep sense of peace and connectedness pervades consciousness. (eu =good, tierra = earth, ia = suffix for member of a group of {positive psychoterratic} conditions). [Albrecht 2010] (Pronounced:
